EasyAsk for Operational Business Intelligence

Progress EasyAsk® for Operational Business Intelligence (BI) fills the gap between search and BI systems to allow executives, analysts, business managers, and professional staff to access the information they need to improve business operations. All businesses have financial goals, such as:

• Maximizing revenue
• Minimizing expenses
• Managing inventory
• Forecasting market demand
• Optimizing the productive use of human and information resources

But achieving these goals requires ideas, analysis, insight, action, and measurement. With EasyAsk, organizations can avoid the traditional data bottlenecks that prevent opportunities from being exploited and inhibit employee execution. With EasyAsk, organizations can finally deliver on the promise of BI investments at not just the executive level, but for all employees.

EasyAsk compliments existing enterprise search and BI investments. Enterprise search is simple to use by all, and it allows users to find information stored in documents or in other formats. BI infrastructure technologies are incredibly powerful, but frequently difficult to use. EasyAsk bridges the gap between search and BI tools, and leverages these technologies to simultaneously find existing reporting assets and generate new ad hoc reports to answer a user's specific question — without the need for any specialist reporting knowledge.

Through a simple, familiar and intuitive'search-like' interface, operational staff are able to easily access important and actionable information using plain language.

For example, if a user asks, "which are the most profitable brands this month by region?" EasyAsk will query all product sales to deliver the answer in seconds. If using traditional BI tools, business users would need to rely on an analyst or IT to access this information. The result is typically a long wait and the inability to drill down further into the data without going back to the analyst/IT. This process frustrates business users and bogs down analyst and IT resources who might otherwise be employed to tackle the most complex and challenging issues for the business. With EasyAsk, companies can:

Provide Easy-to-Use Access to Timely Information

A simple user interface provides timely access to key information. Using natural language, business users can access information from multiple sources to enable swift and informed decision-making —without having to wait for available analyst resources. EasyAsk makes the generation of reports as easy as performing a Web search.

Accelerate Access to BI Data

EasyAsk also provides rapid access to existing BI assets so operations personnel can better leverage the investments made to generate critical business reports and make more informed business decisions. EasyAsk prevents analysts from developing duplicate report, and offloads many requests by operational users through self-services. The result is faster access to information and more effective use of analyst and IT resources.

Deliver Access to More BI Data

Users get easy access to BI data located in repositories across the enterprise and have the opportunity to build on questions to further probe for more information. As questions are asked, users uncover more information that can help them zero in on exactly the insight they need.

Leverage Existing BI Tools

Many companies that use EasyAsk have invested in complex BI tools that don't satisfy the needs of operational users. With EasyAsk, organizations leverage the investment they have already made in existing BI tools to give employees, customers, and partners a way to easily find the information they need using simple language and search terms — whether the answer exists in an existing report or must be generated dynamically.

With EasyAsk, operational users can establish personal reports and alerts that meet the needs of their department, division, territory, or customers — addressing topics such as:

• Who should I call today to protect my business and drive new sales?
• Which of my team should I focus on today to help save a slipping deal?
• Where should we invest marketing dollars to get the fastest return?
• Which customers haven't paid the biggest bills so I can improve cash flow?
• Who dropped their forecast by more than 10% last week?
• Do we have a sufficient inventory to support building our products this month?

EasyAsk Allows Organizations to Share Intelligence

EasyAsk for Operational Business Intelligence can store and aggregate frequently asked questions while users may also save and schedule reports that are run regularly. For example, a sales manager or accounts receivable clerk could ask, "which of my customers have past due invoices?" and schedule the results to be automatically emailed to his/her inbox each week for follow-up."